Many Ethnic Albanians Back Kosovo Peace Pact But Are Willing To Fight

DRAGOBILJE, Yugoslavia — A year ago, he was a construction worker in Munich; today Vellaznini Kryeziu is a brigade commander in the Kosovo Liberation Army.

His headquarters is a dilapidated farmhouse on the edge of this ragged village that KLA guerrillas have successfully defended against superior Serbian forces for nearly 11 months.

But the 32-year-old ethnic Albanian says he is willing to lay down his arms if the KLA's senior command decides to go along with the tentative political agreement reached last week in Rambouillet, France.

"Of course, it will be hard for us because our final aim is known to all," he said.

The Rambouillet framework falls far short of the KLA's aim of creating an independent Kosovo, but it would give the ethnic Albanians, who make up 90 percent of Kosovo's population, a large degree of autonomy during the three-year-long agreement.

What happens at the end of three years is unclear, but the U.S. and its European allies insist this is the best deal the ethnic Albanians can expect.

"Most of the population is supportive," said Agron Bajrami, an ethnic Albanian journalist. "Basically, what it would bring for the Albanians is Serb forces out and NATO forces in and a couple of calm years to think about the future."

But a significant minority within the KLA believes there is more to be gained through a military struggle.

So far, the U.S. has failed to get the Serbs and the Albanians to sign on to the Rambouillet plan. The Albanians are unhappy because it does not give them a referendum that would lead to independence; the Serbs are balking at the idea of allowing NATO troops into Serbia to implement the peace. The impasse forced the U.S. to declare a three-week recess in the talks.

The Albanian delegation says it will sign the agreement when the talks resume March 15, but that it needs the three-week grace period to sell the deal to KLA militants. Three weeks is a long time in the Balkans--certainly long enough for the entire deal to unravel.

"On both sides, the military leadership is convinced that if they were unleashed, they would win. And I think on both sides the military leadership doesn't know what it is talking about," said William Walker, the American diplomat who heads the multinational team of unarmed "verifiers" who are supposed to oversee the shaky cease-fire in effect since October.

For the last few days, Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic has been moving his troops around the Kosovo border. He also has been wiring bridges and tunnels along the Macedonian border with explosives. His intentions are unclear.

One theory is that he is preparing for a final offensive before signing on to Rambouillet. More likely, he is hoping that his menacing presence will discourage the KLA from laying down its arms, thereby scuttling the Rambouillet plan while shifting some of the blame to the Albanian side.

Meanwhile, KLA gunmen fired on the funeral of a Serbian police officer last week, and several Serb villages have been blockaded by the guerrillas. These acts could be a calculated attempt to provoke a Serb overreaction that would swing international support to the ethnic Albanians, or it could merely reflect the undisciplined nature of the KLA.

Walker has been spending the week slogging up muddy trails to remote KLA outposts, trying to persuade militants to accept the deal. He said he was concerned that the KLA's representatives at Rambouillet, instead of listening to the concerns of the majority of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians, would consult only among themselves.

A few days ago the American was in Dragobilje, where he met with brigade commander Kryeziu. According to Kryeziu: "We gave him a positive response. I told him that if our representatives agree to the Rambouillet settlement, then we will agree."

Kryeziu said he supported the Rambouillet plan. He was eager, he explained, to get back to his construction job in Germany.

But others in the guerrilla army are clearly eager for a fight. Unlike the combatants in Bosnia-Herzegovina who signed the Dayton peace accords after four years of war, the KLA and the Serbs have not yet had their fight.

U.S. officials fear the KLA may be seriously overestimating its ability to fight the Serbs.

When the grocery store owner in Dragobilje tried to tell a foreign visitor that he believed the Albanian delegation should have signed the Rambouillet agreement without any delay, he was told to keep quiet by KLA gunmen. The shopkeeper promptly obeyed.

It was the kind of heavy-handed approach that Veton Surroi knew would be inevitable.

"After years of undemocratic life, this will be hard," said Surroi, a newspaper publisher and one of the most articulate moderates on the Albanian negotiating team at Rambouillet.

But Surroi was confident that the Kosovo Albanians would be ready to sign on March 15.